Chapter 3
"Come in!"
The voice which warbled through the door was a wispy ghost of its former self, but it still gave Steve goose bumps just to hear it. Peggy's voice. The last memory he had of her, her voice, as she'd told him 'yes' over the radio just before his plane had gone down in the artic. Yes. She had told him yes. Had she understood he was asking her for more than a dance?
Steve pushed through the door, one hand in his pocket as he fingered the small box Howard Stark had put in with his personal effects when they'd packed up the tiny locker which had been all he'd owned in the world. Howard and Peggy had been close ... or about as close as any two colleagues could be with Peggy forever fending off Howard's brazen advances. It was eerie, how much Tony Stark's relationship with Pepper Potts mirrored the father's relationship with Peggy Carter, although Peggy had married someone else. Steve hadn't dared ask if Howard's advances on Peggy had finally succeeded. Perhaps that was the reason she'd been cast aside and forgotten as soon as the war was over?
"Peggy?" he asked, his voice choking up as he entered the room and noted the walls were painted the same ubiquitous yellow as the rest of the facility. Two hospital beds sat side-by-side, a curtain between them that was pulled halfway shut so someone could nap and not see the face of the person sleeping next to them, but still see their feet. He stepped further into the room to see the ancient woman seated next to the window.
"Steve," said the old woman who bore no resemblance to the Peggy he had once known. Her face was a wrinkled old prune, dotted with liver-spots from too much time in the sun back before they'd known about things like skin cancer and solar radiation. The old woman adjusted coke-bottle glasses and peered at him, gesturing for him to come closer. "Please. Sit."
A radio played softly in the background, modern versions of the big band tunes they had both listened to back when they'd walked in the same period of history. Steve searched her face, desperate to find some familiarity with the wizened woman seated in a reclining chair before the window, her snow white hair neatly curled into the 'set' so many women from her generation preferred. He found nothing familiar in the face that stared back at him. Nothing at all. Even her distinctive heart-shaped jaw had disappeared under 94 years of wrinkles.
"Peggy," he said again, not knowing what else to say. His hands left his pocket, the tiny box abandoned along with the last hope he'd nurtured that somehow he'd be able to resurrect the Peggy he'd once known, just as he'd been resurrected from a 67-year sleep. While Steve had slumbered beneath the ice, Peggy had gone on to live her life, evidence of her adventures proudly displayed on every wall, bureau, and windowsill in the form of pictures of her family. A family she'd gone on to create after he had failed to come back and ask the question he'd been too cowardly to ask while he'd still had the chance.
"I was afraid you wouldn't come," Peggy said, her voice a whisper. That, at least, was familiar to him, although age had weakened it. Made it wispy and thin, not the brassy, self-assured bugle call it had been back when they'd moved together in time. She inhaled, pulling a clear oxygen-mask to her face to take a breath before self-consciously hiding it next to her legs, ashamed to have him see her weakness. She reached up, waiting for him to give her his hand. He sat down in the still-warm chair recently vacated by her grand-daughter and obliged. Her hands were trembling.
"You look..." Steve said, not sure what to say. What could he say to the woman he had meant to marry, but who had been left behind for time to ravage while he had remained young and strong?
"Old," Peggy finished. Her lips curved up into a smile that was familiar, although thinner and more pale than the lips he remembered. He could see a bluish cast where her lipstick ended and her face began, evidence of a body that no longer had the energy to breath completely on its own. He stared at the faint, pear-shaped red mark around her lips and nose and compared it to oxygen mask clutched in her wrinkled claw.
"But look at you," Peggy exclaimed as though he were a small boy. "Still young and handsome. Fury said you hadn't aged while you were gone. But I didn't believe him."
"You spoke to Fury?" Steve asked. Fury hadn't mentioned coming to visit Peggy. Only that a colleague had contacted Pepper Potts.
"He came to discredit me as a fraud," Peggy laughed, her laughter a delightful sound to his ears until it ended in a fit of coughing. She held up one hand and lifted the oxygen mask with her other, oxygen hissing as she breathed until she caught her breath. Peggy may be old, but she was still used to being in charge. For some reason, gasping for breath or not, Steve found this reassuring.
"Don't ever get old," Peggy said when she'd finally lowered her mask. "I always thought I'd die in one of those death-traps Howard Stark used to invent, not end up in a nursing home gasping for breath."
"I know what that feels like," Steve said softly, reaching out to touch the wrinkled hand she'd placed upon her knee. "I had asthma when you first met me, remember? I thought I was going to die when I went through boot camp. Before Erskine injected me with the serum. I was a real wimp back then."
Peggy scrutinized his expression, her eyes still brown beneath her thick glasses, although faded from the color they had once been. They were still Peggy's eyes, even though 67 years of time had added crinkles to the skin around them.
"My first memory of you is jumping on a grenade to save me," Peggy said. "Didn't matter how much you gasped for breath or how far you fell behind the other soldiers after that. Nobody else was ever going to measure up."
Steve fought back the tears which threatened to well into his eyes, shoving down the mixture of grief and joy that, even back then, Peggy had seen him for who he really was. Every woman in the nation had wanted Captain America, the superhero the military had plastered on posters coast-to-coast and trotted out before the cameras to urge people to buy war bonds. Only Doctor Erskine and Bucky and Peggy had ever wanted him for him. The scrawny asthmatic from the Lower East Side of Manhattan whose only talent was getting his ass kicked by bullies and sketching comic book characters.
They talked then. About the good old days. About the missions. About Peggy's five children. Her grand-children. Her two-dozen great-grandchildren, including Bernice, who came to visit her twice a week and showcase her art. All the things Steve had missed out on while Peggy had lived and he'd remained frozen in time. His eyes moved to a black-and-white photograph of a scrawny, blonde man holding a crate of milk bottles standing in front of a horse-drawn carriage marked 'Miller's Dairy.'
"That's my Bill," Peggy said, reaching for the picture and holding it, her eyes misty as she gazed at the picture of her long-dead husband. Her faded brown eyes stared off into some past that Steve couldn't see. "Lots of boys asked me to marry them after ... after your plane went down. Big, strapping men who wanted to show me how strong they were. But only Bill reminded me enough of that skinny boy who'd jumped on top of a grenade to save a bunch of soldiers who'd never done nothing but make fun of him to give him the time of day."
"Did he make you happy?" Steve asked, staring at the man who might have been him had he not been lost in the sands of time.
"Yes," Peggy said, that smile that was an echo of the smile he had fallen in love with all those years before lighting up her face and, just for a moment, making the years between them fall away. "Bill was a good husband. I'm looking forward to joining him."
Silence stretched between them. A comfortable silence, for no words were adequate, or necessary, to express the distance between them or the regret each had at not having been able to walk down that path together. Their time had come, and gone, without them.
"Do you remember the last thing you asked me before your plane went down?" Peggy asked.
"Yes," Steve said, his voice cracking with emotion over the fact she even remembered.
"Every year on the anniversary of your ... disappearance," Peggy whispered. "I went to the nearest café and would wait for you to come and give me that dance. Even after I married Bill."
Steve stared at his hands, afraid if he looked into her eyes the lump which was clawing at his throat would cause him to break down and cry.
"Will you give it to me now?" she asked.
"Of course," Steve said.
He helped her adjust the tubing of her oxygen mask and get to her feet, turning up the volume on the radio station. Bing Cosby's melancholy voice sang 'I'll Be Seeing You' as they moved together. Peggy leaned against him for support as she rested her cheek against his chest, listening to his heart. His arms slid around her stooped, frail form and he closed his eyes. Just for a moment, the sixty-seven years which stood between them fell away and they were back in 1945, dancing in a smoky USO hall. Dancing the dance fate had stolen from them.
The song ended. Sixty-seven years that Peggy had lived and he had not came rushing back, not even the words he had never spoken, but which both understood had existed, were enough to overcome the wheels of time. Peggy's husband awaited her on the other side of the veil which Thor called Valhalla. She was tired. Steve helped her into her bed, tucking her blankets around her neck and pushing the button to page the nurse. The nurse bustled in, rearranging Peggy's oxygen mask so she wouldn't asphyxiate in her sleep.
"I did love you, you know," Peggy mumbled as she dropped off to sleep, her words muffled by the plastic mask.
"I know," Steve said.
Kissing her on the forehead, the frail grandmother who would never be his wife, but who still meant the world to him, Steve quietly shut the door behind him so nothing would disturb his Peggy's dreams.
"I'll come back this time," he said. "I promise."
X
Thanks for reading! Don't forget to hit the big yellow 'like' star and tell me what you think! Reader reviews keep fanfiction writers writing your favorite stories!